


Until You Find Whoever You're Bleeding For

by Mornelithe_falconsbane



Category: The Witcher (TV), Wiedźmin | The Witcher - All Media Types
Genre: F/M, Geralt z Rivii | Geralt of Rivia Has Feelings, Hurt Geralt z Rivii | Geralt of Rivia, Hurt/Comfort, Protective Yennefer z Vengerbergu | Yennefer of Vengerberg, Whump, Yennefer being kind, they both have a LOT of issues
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-09
Updated: 2020-09-09
Packaged: 2021-03-06 14:13:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,669
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26370199
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mornelithe_falconsbane/pseuds/Mornelithe_falconsbane
Summary: The first time they meet again, Yennefer throws Geralt into a freezing river.
Relationships: Geralt z Rivii | Geralt of Rivia/Yennefer z Vengerbergu | Yennefer of Vengerberg
Comments: 9
Kudos: 87
Collections: We Die Like Fen 4: We Lived to Die Afen





	Until You Find Whoever You're Bleeding For

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Corina (CorinaLannister)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/CorinaLannister/gifts).



It's the middle of the night when fate wakes her.

Yennefer is immediately alert, awake, and compelled to look out at the first full moon of spring where it gleams flat and sliver behind the window's glass. Yennefer breathes out, white fog rising from between her lips as she presses her fingertips against the cold glass. Something is wrong. Something, somewhere.

Her bare feet are cold on the stone floors, and Yennefer would return to bed if she could shake the certainty that something was being stolen from her as she hesitates. 

"Cursed fates," she whispers, chaos flickering around her as she focuses her will on the premonition. She loathes fortune telling, despises the very idea of predestination, but Yennefer is not the kind of idiot who ignores warnings that her own magic tries to give.

_The trees are stark black shadows against the midnight sky, the moon huge and cold as it gazes down upon the lingering snow. The corpse of a truly massive werewolf lies sprawled over the cold white drifts, the first crocuses of spring soaked with the beast's blood. Beneath it lies a man._

Yennefer's eyes open, knowledge a rich taste on her tongue and the scent of blood unfurling around her. The Witcher from last summer. How odd that her magic would believe him important, or even of interest. What did he have that she could possibly desire?

The thought strikes like a blade into her spine, and Yennefer knows--whatever it is, it's something she desires more than air, and the Witcher will give it to her. This certainty struck with the clarity and precision of lightning, and the force of destiny. A failure to act will curse her future for decades to come, the chaos insists, whispering very clearly into her mind.

Witchers are was sterile as sorceresses, albeit for very different reasons, but perhaps...perhaps he will show her a path to what she wants, one day? If so, Yennefer would be a fool to let his life slip away. It is in her own interest to see to his survival. 

Yennefer turns away from the staring moon and slides between the pages of the world. She steps into one of the storage rooms of a rarely used winter palace. It's warm year round, here, and the gardens are lovely. And if her experiments explode, no one will think to blame her for it.

It's a modest space, no more than a bed and a desk surrounded by shelves of books and various things she'd found and wished to keep over the years. On the desk lay the cracked djinn's seal, spread apart over her sketches of it. Attempting to subdue the djinn had been, in retrospect, possibly, potentially, perhaps hubris on her part. The spell containing the djinn had ended nearly eight months ago, and the lingering traces of chaos still hum under her fingers like the warmth of a body after death. She still thinks it could have worked, though.

Yennefer mutters a children's chant in Elder--roughly translated it means something like _find my lover by the brook, where blackbirds sing and blackberries ripen,_ which made it remarkably convenient for finding anyone she'd ever fucked, including the Witcher. It also could find blackberries or blackbirds should she be insufficiently focused about it.

The knowledge of where to go slips into her mind as though it had always been there. Yennefer grabs socks and sensible boots from the wardrobe, because she'll never go barefoot in snow again if she can help it, and then she opens a portal to Kaedwen, deep in the foothills of the Blue Mountains. The wind slices through the portal, sending her notes skittering over her desk and onto the floor, and Yennefer grabs her winter cloak, wrapping it around her shoulders before she steps through.

The scent of blood and offal is like a farmyard in autumn, nearly overpowering in how thick it is. The air is crisp and the wind is sharp, and the moon's light shows her that which she has already seen. A hideous beast cut nearly in two, the tip of a silver sword erupting from its spine. Beneath it, the Witcher struggles to free himself.

He does not struggle very hard, for a man being covered in blood and the seepage of the werewolf's viscera. Yennefer's lip curls in disgust, and she glances behind her, following the gurgling of water to a small creek about thirty feet behind her. Ice crusts the edges, but it'll do for scrubbing him off before she takes him back. She won't have the stench of werewolf shit tainting her home.

"Lilacs?" he wheezes, and something bubbles in his voice--blood, probably. A pierced lung? Yennefer is a terrible healer, she'll have to call in a favour from someone if he's actively dying. 

Yennefer lifts the werewolf's corpse with a flick of her fingers and hangs it into a tree above like a particularly ghoulish midwinter decoration. 

"Fuck. Sorceress? What," he mutters, struggling to his elbows, then whistles so sharply that Yennefer jumps half out of her skin. "Sorry--Roach."

He's delirious already. Yennefer covers her nose with her cloak, breathing in the scent of her perfume as she raises him into the air as easily as she had the werewolf.

The Witcher yelps and flails like he thinks he could break her spell, then--

Yennefer dodges to the side almost too slow, fire crisping the ends of her hair and lighting up the edge of her cloak. She flattens the fire out of existence with a thought, using its death to immobilize the damn Witcher's hands. "What the hell was that?" she snaps, rattled by the strength of the chaos he'd just flung at her. Since when were Witchers good for more than waving hunks of silver at monsters? "Do you bite every hand that feeds you, Witcher, or just mine?"

"Who the fuck are you?" he snarls back, not much more than a trembling, filthy heap in the snow. Pathetic, really. His eyes shine like an animal's in the dark, and they widen as he gets a better look at her. "You're that fucking mage. The idiot one with the djinn. What the _fuck_ are you doing here?"

Yennefer stares at him, and considers, strongly, just leaving him in the snow to die. She'd lose out on whatever premonition had woken her, but the satisfaction she'd gain in return would surely keep her going through the disappointment.

Something crashes through the woods behind her before she can decide and Yennefer flings out a barrier spell without even thinking. A shining lavender bubble circles her and the Witcher as a huge shape comes out of the trees, then shies away from the light. Yennefer wonders, a bit desperately, why she'd thought going to a Witcher's hunting ground in the middle of the night was at all a good idea before she realizes that it's nothing but a horse.

"Roach!" The Witcher struggles to his feet, then wobbles there for a long, lingering second before he falls back on his ass. Idiot, Yennefer thinks spitefully, her heart still racing from the shock.

"You called your horse Roach?" she asks, dropping the barrier spell. "And stay still for ten minutes so I can get you clean."

"I'm fine, mage, leave me be." He's trying to get up again and Yennefer can't tell if he broke something in one of his legs or if he hit his head hard, but either way the Witcher looks like an uncoordinated puppy trying to take its first steps.

Yennefer picks him up with a wave of chaos, ignoring his sharp yelp and then his snarled protests as she dumps him into the creek on the other side of the clearing. "Scrub off, Witcher. I can smell the creature's bowels on you."

"Are you trying to kill me?" He demands, waist deep in ice-cold water and clumsily rubbing the front of his armor in spite of his protests. "What do you even _want_?"

Yennefer doesn't have a good lie prepared for that. She doesn't even have a good truth. "Shut up, Witcher. I'll portal you somewhere safe and then we'll go our separate ways."

"You'll fucking what--" his teeth chatter so hard that whatever he's saying is unintelligible. "--I'm not going fucking anywhere without my horse or--" he shivers again, bones rattling inside skin painted silver-white in the moonlight. "--without its head!"

Yennefer looks up at the werewolf, high in the oak tree. She stretches out her hand toward it and mumbles a few lines that sound vaguely like Elder. Call it drama, call it a natural wariness of letting people know what she was capable of, but Yennefer always does considerably more than strictly needed for any given spell. She sends chaos out in a silent whip, cleaving the werewolf's head from its body. The head landed in the snow with an audible wet slap. "Satisfied?"

"Roach hates portals," the Witcher tells her as he tries to crawl out of the creek, ice cracking as he hauls himself over it. His hand slips, sending him crashing face-first through the thin ice and into the water. He doesn't surface.

Yennefer sighs. So much for the much vaunted resilience of a Witcher. She doesn't bother with the hand gestures or words this time, just pulls the soaking wet Witcher into the air with nothing but the force of her annoyance. "I assure you, the horse will get over it."

He sputters and gags, then throws up black fluid into the snow. It reeks of thick and bitter poison, and Yennefer grimaces. He's repulsive, so he's not going anywhere she cares about--which means she's taking him to the cottage by the lake in Toussaint. It's a bare step up from the hovel she was born in, but it has a one stall stable and a pasture out back for his horse, and she enchanted it to be invisible to anyone who didn't know precisely where it was. Which, with her portalling him there, the Witcher would not.

The fight seems to have finally died out of him, the Witcher shivering weakly in the wind and no longer fighting the grip of her magic.

She opens the portal with a thought, shoving the Witcher and the head through it with the same thought. Then Yennefer reaches for the horse's reins, narrowly dodging its sharp nip. Ungrateful beast. "Come, you stupid thing." It's unimpressed by her, she can tell, and there's nothing Yennefer hates more than something being unimpressed by her.

She pulls on the reins. The horse doesn't move. Yennefer huffs, and tugs harder. The horse doesn't seem to notice. "Oh come on." Yennefer eyes it, then looks around for a stick to poke it with. That was how she'd gotten the pigs moving, wasn't it?

Her portal hums, the Witcher stumbling back through it like a Velen drunkard on a three day bender. He falls to his knees as soon as he's through, steadying himself with one hand in the snow. He sighs like he can't believe he's doing this, his eyes flashing green in the darkness and makes a hand gesture that makes a pale white glow envelop the horse's head. It starts walking toward the portal, suddenly utterly unconcerned by the bright blue swirling maelstrom. "How--how the fuck did you think you were gonna--going to get her through?" he asks, still shivering so bad that he can barely get the words out.

"I could probably have picked her up, too," Yennefer lies, glad she hadn't managed to find a likely stick yet. "Can you even walk, Witcher?"

The Witcher scoffs at her and hauls himself to his feet using his horse's stirrup, then steadies himself on the oddly placid horse before he walks back through the portal.

"Nice place," he says when Yennefer joins him on the other side, and she gets the oddest feeling that he actually means it. That a pathetic three room cottage in the middle of fucking nowhere was somehow _nice_ to him.

"It'll do," she says, choosing to forget that once it had been good enough for her, too. That this was the one of the first places she'd borrowed from the world, when she'd been young and stupid. That had been long ago. She sniffs the air, but the scent of shit and blood is far fainter now, largely drowned out by a distinct odor of wet dog. "You still need a bath, you reek."

"Did you kidnap me just to bathe me?" the Witcher asks. Yennefer realizes, startled, that he's got his sword out, not quite raised, but--wary. "What do you want, witch?"

"I'm a sorceress, Witcher, not a fucking witch. And you smell like a kennel after the rain. Be good and I'll even warm the water before I toss you into it." Yennefer watches his sword, keeping chaos tight around her--enough to protect herself, and enough to heal herself if she isn't fast enough to protect herself.

The Witcher looks at her with the deepest suspicion, and Yennefer is mildly offended. She has no particular motivations beyond helping him, as ridiculous as that may seem to the both of them. "Fine," he gives in, and Yennefer scrapes his thoughts just enough to be sure that he _means_ it.

He sets the sword down under the eaves of the cottage, unwilling to sheath it without cleaning it. He thinks of simply lying down and letting her do as she wills--surely it'll be easier than fighting it. He's hungry, hurting, and so damned tired. He knows what mages do to Witchers, but--fuck, she hadn't hurt him last time. Not much, anyway.

It's not the most reassuring indication that he will not attack her, but it'll do for now. Yennefer opens the cottage door, snapping the stasis spell on the interior. It still smells like bread--Yennefer can't remember the last time she'd bothered trying to make bread. 

She leaves the door open behind her as she goes deeper, looking for the bath she vaguely remembers being in this cottage. She finds it behind the wooden screen in the main room, surrounded by her childish first attempts at spellcraft. Yennefer sweeps her notes into the chest under the window and drops the lid down on it. Then she locks it in place with a spell to ensure it stays there.

Once--ha. Many, many years ago, Yennefer had thought of making life comfortable for more than just the rich. Turned out, though, that life was comfortable for the rich because the poor couldn't pay worth shit. Fuck, this place was pathetic. A bare step above living in a ditch, and she'd dared be proud it?

She tugs the lever on the pipe on the wall, water pouring from the cistern on the roof. She'd fucked the smith who made it, but the runes to purify the water and heat it, she'd etched those into the copper herself. They drew power from the sun's light, but she'd never gotten them strong enough to make the water truly hot in winter. The tub fills fast, and she closes off the pipe before it can overfill, then tests the water. It's skin warm at best.

The runes need to be on the roof, not down here in the dim little cottage. Yennefer doesn't know why she'd ever thought differently. She heats the water again to just shy of too hot, because as far as the Witcher will know, the runes work perfectly.

The Witcher still hasn't followed her inside.

Miffed, Yennefer heads back outside. She finds him taking his horse's saddle off in the small stable. It's in better condition than she'd expected after forty odd years of neglect, though Toussaint stonework did tend to hold up to the elements. The Witcher glances at her as she approaches, his face neutral but his thoughts a twisting mess of nerves. She nudges a little deeper and comes back with another reason to loathe Stregobor, though she'd hardly needed more fuel for that particular flame. Yennefer contemplates reassuring him that she had no particular interest in cutting him apart, but she can't come up with a reason for him to believe her.

Irritated, she presses onward. "Bath's ready when you are."

He nods silently, unhooking his saddle bags and putting them by the stable door. The saddle itself he'd put on a rack by the wall, the bridle on a hook beside it. Yennefer notes this, mildly surprised that that was what those were for. She's never ridden a horse she had to take care of herself. He keeps reaching out to brace himself on the wall, or on his horse. Such unsteadiness is probably a bad sign, but neither of them want her to try to help. First, he smells. Second, he might very well stab her.

"Is the lake safe?" the Witcher asks abruptly.

"For...?"

"If I set her loose by the lake, will drowners eat her?" The Witcher pulls out a brush and starts brushing through the darker fur where the saddle had sat on her. "The trough is bone dry in the corral, and I can't see a bucket--"

Apparently he's not going to do jack-shit until his horse is taken care of. Yennefer sighs, starting to feel the hour of the night. "I can fill the trough." She heads around to the back where she fills the bucket from the rain barrel and hauls it out to the corral.

"You aren't--" He brought the horse to the corral in time to see her with the bucket, and Yennefer stares him down, refusing to be embarrassed. She'd used enough magic that this is easier. He can go fuck himself if he doesn't like it. "Never seen a mage do work," he says uncertainly, like she's grown a second head. He's so abruptly less scared of her that Yennefer worries that she's reading the horse's thoughts instead.

"First time for everything." Yennefer pours the bucket into the trough, and wonders if he can tell that she's done this before. If he cares.

But why would he? Witchers crawl through blood and shit for halved copper marks, and were spat on for the joy of it. Yennefer breathes in slow, remembers him saying _nice place_. It settles something inside her, like a hand smoothing down ruffled feathers. She doesn't understand why, but she doesn't care to examine it. "I'll finish the job, if you want to go inside."

The Witcher shrugs, still shivering, but far less in the warm spring air of Toussaint. "There a second bucket?"

There was.

***

Geralt eases down into the steaming hot bath with a noise that was half-pain, half-pleasure. The heat is like needles stabbing his skin, but it feels damn nice at the same time. He can't remember the last time he'd had a real bath--hopefully not before winter began, but Geralt wouldn't bet on it. The water is better than sex.

His bruises have bruises (and the occasional broken bone), and his stomach is trying to eat his spine. He'd nearly had to cut his boot off to get his foot out of it, and he's pretty sure something is broken in his ankle. And his ribs. He'd needed the bounty from the werewolf either for food or for replacing Roach's girth, and he'd been pretty sure it was going to be the girth. With a broken ankle, he would have been lucky to get back to town, get paid, and replace the girth, and astronomically lucky to get all three.

But then the Sorceress. 

Geralt stares at the ceiling, his stomach twisting painfully as the scent of fresh stew fills the tidy cottage she'd dragged him to.

He shouldn't have followed her. 

He doesn't have a clue what she wants. Probably not his dick. Even if Geralt were inclined to flatter himself, the sex hadn't been worth all the effort of this. He'd passed out as soon as he'd come and slept for three days, which had been frankly embarrassing to find out from Jaskier. Even if it'd been the best sex she'd ever had, half the world had a dick, and a woman like the sorceress could take whichever of them she pleased. No run-down old Witcher is going to be more than a footnote on her autobiography.

Still, she'd taken him to a home--hers?--helped take care of Roach, shoved him into a hot bath, and now she's making him dinner. Possibly breakfast. It was damn late at night. It smells fucking good.

Geralt likes to think of himself as a strong man, but he's not this strong. He's about four seconds from giving her his eternal devotion, and the only thing stopping him is the fact that not a single fucking soul in the entire forsaken world wants that of him. If there's fresh bread, though, she may end up with it anyway.

"Sorceress?"

She makes a noise, and Geralt takes that as encouragement. "What is your name?" he asks, heat slowly seeping into his bones from the bath. She'd introduced herself in Rinde, he's almost certain of that, but it'd happened so fast and he'd honestly thought he'd never see her again.

That makes her laugh. Geralt is dizzy with hunger, hungover from his potions and exhausted from one of the roughest winters he's ever lived through. And Geralt thinks, _she has a really nice laugh._ He also thinks that he's a fucking idiot.

"Yennefer of Vengerberg. And yourself, Witcher?"

"Geralt of Rivia," he replies, and gives a soft huff of amusement that they both forgot. 

She blows on something, then sips from it, before muttering something about the servants always forgetting salt. She might have actually stolen the stew from somewhere, but it smells _very_ good. 

Magic rolls behind the screen, humming through the wolf amulet on his chest and he abruptly smells fresh bread.


End file.
